


in memoriam

by cosmofluous



Series: the interludes [5]
Category: No. 6 - All Media Types, Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Angst, Death, Ficlet, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Mild Gore, no. 6 au, some surrealism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 05:19:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9585170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmofluous/pseuds/cosmofluous
Summary: Arima Kishou is dead.(We leave flowers on gravestones, we plant flowers in gardens in cemeteries in the backs of suburban neighbourhoods. We give flowers for love and friendship, gratitude and sorrow. Dead people have no use for flowers. It is the living who need graves, and loved ones to mourn, and an afterlife to believe in.)





	

'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,  
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?  
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?'

* * *

** asphodels**

The tip of the blade tears his scalp and fractures his skull on entry. It divides the folds of his brain tissue as neatly as a butterfly knife through ice-cream. Neurons and synapses and arteries give way as easily tributaries before a flood. The quinque exits through his left eye, skewering the viscous material within, straight through the empty, black pupil. He has blood jellying in his eye socket. It rips through his sclera, excises his cornea, discards the ring of muscle that is his iris, and the bubble of his lens.

Pain is not a thing which can be confined with words or memory. ‘It hurts.’ ‘It hurts so much that I want to die.’ Nothing is truly capable of conveying pain. Neither can one type of pain be compared with another. ‘It hurts as badly as if my body has been laid open from the spine out, split in half vertically.’ Organs and muscles and tendons arrayed on the platter of his wrenched bones. Pain exists in unique strains. It is not so much the extremity or type or duration of pain which matters, but the fact that the pain exists at all.

Even so, pain is the way the body tells the mind that it is alive. That its structure has been compromised and needs to be fixed. The fear and revulsion which accompany pain are the products of his own mind.

* * *

_ This is the dead land  
_ _ This is cactus land _

* * *

** crossing of the three rivers **

‘And you never guessed that he loved you?’

The boy shrugged. He was wearing a child's sailor suit underneath an enormous white coat. It dwarfed him, made of him an estranged orphan on a grey battlefield. The metal chair in the interrogation room was too big for him, too, and he swung his legs in the empty air below, uncaring of the abyss.

He looked at his questioner with big black eyes. ‘The people who loved me all loved me in strange ways.’ He paused, looked to the side, flicked his gaze back up like a wolf cub. It was far too old and wise for a tiny child hiding in the empty shell of some ancient knight’s discarded armour. ‘I think I didn’t want him to love me. Or I think I didn’t want to know, so that’s why I didn’t think of it. Because I was always hurt the most by the people I loved. And this just proves me right. So what? Why are you looking at me like I did something wrong? Like I’ve said something awful?’

The interrogator shook their head, leaned back in their chair. They cast a curious gaze over the defiant little pup. ‘Don’t you think that would hurt him?’

The child said brashly, ‘Dead people don’t get hurt.’

The interrogator challenged him, just as harshly, ‘And do you wish that you were dead?’

‘Sometimes.’ That odd movement of the eyes again. A swishing of the coat as he swung his legs. The interrogator glanced at the two-way mirror that covered the side of wall and saw that his feet were bare. ‘Sometimes I wished I was dead. Sometimes I still wish I were dead. But being dead is nothing. No more pain, and no more happiness either. I already decided I would live. But he didn’t.’ He looked the interrogator in the eye again, and his gaze wasn’t wise and knowing, but blind with anger, full of directionless sorrow. ‘Tell me this, then,’ he demanded. ‘If he loved me, why did he die? If he loved me, he would have lived for me.’

‘He didn’t have much time left, anyway.’

‘He should have lived for me,’ the boy said stubbornly. ‘You keep saying all this stuff about how he felt—he loved me, he would be hurt, he is hurt that I never understood him—none of that matters, don’t you see?’

The boy seemed to grow older before the interrogator’s eyes, ice crystallising in his voice. ‘I care nothing for formless love,’ he said, quiet and low. He was young still, pretty and seemingly unmarred. He had outgrown his clothes beneath the jacket, and he clutched it around his naked body like a blanket. ‘What do intentions matter? What do words matter?’ he asked bitterly, turning on the inquisitor.

‘But he did love you, in his deeds. He spared your life, he named you, he spent time with you. He taught you to fight, he praised you, he smiled for you. He gave you gifts. He trusted you. Does all of that mean nothing to you?’

‘What does it matter if I never understood? He was training me to kill him. He probably wanted me to hate him. He didn’t want me to know he cared until the very end.’ And then his face was anguished, the way only adolescents can be anguished, with a terrible combination of naivety and disillusionment.

‘Is that it, then?’ asked his interrogator. ‘Will you walk away from this with only anger and sorrow and bitterness? Is that all you can take from this? Will you avenge him?’

The youth grew older again, grew into his sharper features. The coat fit him perfectly now, the high open collar standing straight and framing his shirt and tie. His eyes were lighter, less deep, less stark in his face. His gaze was tired. ‘And turn the cycle again?’ He looked away, to the wall without the mirror. ‘Are we done here?’ he asked, and it was almost a rhetorical question.

‘No.’

The man sighed. ‘We’re done here,’ he said, and walked away.

* * *

_What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow  _  
_Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,_  
_You cannot say, or guess, for you know only_  
_A heap of broken images_

* * *

 **on**   **elysian fields**

The man who visits him introduces himself as Arima Kishou.  His impression of the other is that of a slab of marble. Arima-san is a head taller than him, and broad-shouldered. His physical presence is implacable, forbidding, but not hulking. His white hair and preference for white clothes doesn't fade his presence, but announces it like a beacon. He is not sure if Arima-san is a lighthouse warning ships off rocks, or a chemical hazard sign glowing in neon.

Arima-san is non-threatening in the way a slab of marble is non-threatening, in that he will not move to attack, but one can still dash themselves to pieces against him. He is cold too, and displays about as much capacity for emotion as a rock. But it's that constancy and lack of outward affection that reassures him that Arima-san will not lie to him. After all, his blunt honesty teeters on the threshold of cruelty.

('They're dead. I killed them all.')

The few memories he has are vague impressions, like badly-processed photographs. Confusing in their instantaneousness and lack of context. His bare feet on the wintry floor. A soothing voice. A single flower waving to and fro in a sluggish wind, in oppressive heat. Cool fingers carding through his sweat-damp hair. Looking at a distant grey ceiling and thinking that he must, he must, he must go and save them before they died and left him all alone.

And worst of all, the fear. For a while now, all he knew was the fear. It soaked him; it drowned him. The air that he breathed wasn't air at all, it was agony, and it was agony that his heart and lungs pumped throughout his body. So it wasn't quite right to say that he was consumed by the fear; the fear and pain had merged and become one and the same.

A small clatter that stops his breath. He stares in the direction of the door, every sense alert. It isn't mealtime—not time for panic, fury, powerlessness, guilt, self-loathing. It isn't time for that, so why? Why do this to him?

The book lands on the floor with a forlorn thump.

'If that isn't enough, I'll bring more.' Then footsteps, fading away.

He knows that voice. He hates that voice. He feels, inexplicably, cheated. Whatever he was promised, whatever he had bargained for, there is no sign of it. There is no sign of anything. Only static in his brain, ice in his bones. The gauze abrading the skin around his eyes is sticky-slick with pus and blood. He would give anything to see again, but he doesn’t have anything.

The book sits innocently on the floor, waiting. He watches it as intently as if it has teeth. As if it is an intelligent predator, trying to lure him into a false sense of security.

He tries to line his thoughts up in a row, but they keep scattering, marbles across a checkered floor. Ah, that's right. The voice. The hated voice. But a recognised voice. He hates that he yearns towards it, as if it will provide him with something he doesn't have. An easy enough criteria to fill, but even so. It's a voice without edges, and one of colourlessness. It's the wind rushing beneath the canopy of a dark forest, omniscient as the currents in an ocean. Unseen and insistent, soft and strong. The place in which many are irretrievably lost, and yet it is the only home to which he can return. He hates its promises, the dichotomies of it.

When he finally picks up the book, it feels pliant in his hands, even though it's a hardback. The corners are rounded and kind. The cover doesn't adhere to his tacky fingers, but it doesn't reject them either. It falls open, inviting, and the fanning out of the pages makes a tuneless music, a rustling sigh, that chases the silence away. The light is faint, but he can still make out the characters in their orderly columns. Ink, paper, dust. A bookstore. A typewriter. Dust motes dancing in a shaft of amber light, afternoon light, spilling in from the window and alighting on the polished floorboards. Light as a spirit of the air. Freedom itself. He thinks of all the colour that his cell lacks, all the colour that he has lost. The book snarls at him.

Bile rises in the back of his throat. He was wrong. It's high tide.

He throws the book away from himself. 

* * *

"'We do not take note of flowers,' said the geographer.

"'Whyever not! They're prettier than anything else.'  


"'Because flowers are ephemeral.'"

* * *

_... I could not _  
_Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither_  
_Living nor dead, and I knew nothing._  
_Looking into the heart of light, the silence._  
Oed' und leer das Meer.

* * *

The arch of pillars, a row of looming curves above, held nothing in their hollows. The world was so cruel in its stillness, in its continued forward movement. The air was a stagnant mass bound by white walls. His heart was still beating, and he could feel his pulse in the broken vessels of his bruises, a dull thumping, ache of pain. Each sound was a shell of life, of meaning. Too little, too cold, too late. The sound of it was futile, harsh in its reverberation, meaningless pain. Without gain.

Only loss.

* * *

** paradise **

Haise wakes in the night with his face pressed to Kishou’s shoulder, breathing hard. He forgets, for an instant, where he is. His mind is a bowl scraped clean, and at the bottom is the dregs of something terrible, staining the bone china. The remnant is hollow in and of itself - it’s not that he’s forgotten what it is, but that it was empty to begin. He chases the structure of that cold emptiness, the details of the dream. Kishou shifts against him; his arm must be going numb. Haise sinks back into the mattress, surrendering to their shared warmth.

‘What’s wrong?’ asks Kishou, through a mouthful of sleep. His blue-black hair is a faint gleam in the darkness, like water off a samurai’s blade.

‘Bad dream,’ Haise whispers. He lifts his head obligingly so that Kishou can move his arm out from underneath. They shuffle around under the blankets, getting comfortable again. Kishou wraps his arms around Haise, holding him close. The days are getting shorter and shorter, colder and colder, but Haise forgets the snow outside when Kishou holds him.

Kishou mumbles something that sounds like, ‘I’m here.’ Haise can sense that he’s already drifting off. He pushes the tip of his cold nose into Kishou’s shirt, breathing in his scent. He smells like wildflowers, like something clean and free and unrestrained. Sighing into that scent, he sleeps.

They are standing around the stove in their pyjamas the next morning, coffees in hand, when Haise says it.

‘I dreamed that you were dead,’ he says. He goes to sit on the couch when he remembers, drawing his feet under him. He clutches his mug in both hands, shaking, fingers white-knuckled. Kishou comes to take it away before it spills, setting it on the coffee table. ‘You were dead, you were dying because of some strange illness, your hair was white, and I never knew- I never knew that you loved me-’

Kishou takes his shaking hands, puts them on either side of his own face. Haise cradles that beloved countenance, and remembers that face going slack as he died, marred by blood and tears. ‘I’m right here,’ says Kishou, ever-patient. He looks into Haise’s eyes, holding his gaze, convincing him of his existence.

‘And you knew, you must have known, that- that I feared you-’

‘It was a dream,’ says Kishou. ‘It’s gone now. It’s okay.’ Haise realises that he’s crying, tears dripping off his chin, and Kishou is alarmed. ‘It’s alright now,’ he reassures him.

Haise shakes his head. ‘It felt so real. I woke up and it was like something was gone. It was more than just losing you, having you die in my arms—it was like I killed you myself.’ He chokes the last of it out, a scouring confession. The tears burned his throat.

Kishou moves closer. His hands had been holding Haise’s to his cheek, but he moves one now to cup the back of his head, pressing their foreheads together. Haise trembles with sobs he can’t suppress, nothing like the keen that had torn itself from his mouth—like his grief had been a living thing, a wolf’s howl returning to the cold moon. ‘And that won’t happen,’ says Kishou. His tone is almost wry. Haise forgets to cry and looks at him, really sees him. Drinks the sight of him in. His dark hair is tousled from sleep, but still has a sleekness to it. Like a raven’s feathers, like the midnight sky. It frames his face, a stark contrast to his pale skin. So delicate, _like the maidens you play,_ he teased, sometimes. His soulful grey eyes, so wide, so alive; bottomless and yet lit from within. Not like the shuttered gaze in his dream, turned inwards and resigned to his sorrow. The straight line of his nose, leading to his perfect, bow-shaped lips. Haise presses a kiss to them, and Kishou is warm, receptive. He feels himself calm.

He looks around at their little sanctuary, cheerily lit by the stove, lashed by ice and wind outside. Rows and rows and rows of books, their blanket-heaped bed, hot food, fresh coffee. Things to share. ‘Okay,’ he says, in response to Kishou’s questioning look, and exhales a shaky breath. ‘Okay,’ he says, more steadily. He lets go the tattered edges of the cold dream, revelling in the here and now, in the knowledge that neither of them could kill the other. Safe, cared for, requited. Loved.

He says to him, ‘No revolutions,’ and Kishou agrees.

* * *

( _Desolate and empty the sea_ )

**Author's Note:**

> quotes from t.s. eliot's "the wasteland" and "hollow men" and st. exupery's "the little prince"


End file.
